Friday, October 28, 2016

Perumal Murugan spoke
in Delhi,on August 22nd
2016, at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, after his two books, One Part Woman, (Maadhorubaagan) and Pyre, were publishedin English, by Penguin. The foremost question
insome people’s minds was, “Will you be
comfortable in metropolitan cities like New Delhi, Paris, or Berlin?” Murugan,
a quiet, self assured, soft spoken man made it very clear that he longed for
home, that he had never slept under a roof till he was twenty. The great
outdoors, the cowshed, the loveliness of the trees, the rich earth, that was
what he missed most, now that he had been forced out of the familiar places
which he was so intimate with.

One Part Woman
represents the Aradhaneswar cult, a soft and sensuous code for unmitigated
passion, when Parvati comes home to Siva, and merges into him. For those who
hated Murugan’s representation ofan
arbitrary coitus as serving the practical interests of people without children,
the traditions of local communities were forcibly sanitized by them, in popular
protests in order to write new cultural histories. Murugan however, was very
clear that tradition and history are suffused in our present. He believed that
fiction merely clothed emotions which still lie latent, and all the
possibilities of promiscuity, when conjoined by faith, deliver us into a
landscape that is peopled with other realities, other truths. To write
intimately of the wretchedness of traditional practice, with the seductiveness
of the novelist’s claim to represent reality, was his only crime. To be forced
to leave home because he told ahistorical tale, haunted his days, till theCourt came out with the verdict that he was
free to write, “Write!”

The holy hill at
Tiruchengode, Namakkal district, where theAradhaneswara(symbiosis of Shiva
and Parvati) cult still exists, is a site of tremendous power. The ancient
Saivite shrines illustrate that the cult of the goddess is dependent on the
absorption of the devi. Much of the advaitin principle of assimilation is
brought to our notice here, in the convergence of symbols, and the secret and
the hidden are represented as important symbols of a cosmic fertility. The
local community reinforces the idea not only of the vividness of sarpa worship,
which are chthonic reminders of ancient cultic forms before anthropomorphism
takes place, but are alsoemotional
organisers of contemporary representations of fear, sexuality and
effervescence. The rat, the boar, the elephant,the cow, the bull become the totemistic forms of the meeting of nature
and culture, where theirsacred and
aesthetic presence becomes of immense importance. Within this, the segregation
of local communities can be well located in terms of their personal relations
with the animal world. In the hill at Tiruchengode, Amba nestles with Durga,
which communicates the primacy of her status during Navarathri over other
manifestations of the divine.

The hierarchy that Hinduism imposes in tradition is
inviolable when the order of birth is prescribed by tradition. Perumal Murugan
describes this inviolability by looking at how each caste then represents its
order in terms of the consummation of its caste rules. Lower caste orthodoxies
can thus be as powerful as upper caste ones, they can be as forbidding and as
totalizing. The real world view of the poor then closes upon itself in terms
which are borrowed from varna, or colour, and the power of the presence of
existing rules can exclude as much as it can forbid. Love by itself can never
survive in the face of these terrible rules, they foreclose destiny, they
crumple free will.

Perumal Murugan, named after the great Lord at
Tiruchengode,now resides insolitude, in exile with his family inan unfamiliar urban milieu. Yet, the
landscape that he describes for us, is so over powering, so exquisite,that we can only dwell in the calmness of
these rural spaces. Here subsistence farming allows the Tamils their historic
splendor of unspoiled lands, withtheir
produce of groundnut, rice, sugar cane, jasmines, plantains, palm trees
(providing areca, dates, and nongu, and coconuts,) also the mangoes which
ornament every house, and themoringa
trees. The sea at Rameswaram, with its cross bow of water at nearby Dhanushkodi,
isvery close. The blue is turquoise and
grey, and the sun provides us adazzling
glimpse of this hot, unfettered land. Not far from Tiruchenkode, the
Uttarasumangalai temple presents us theremembrance of the whispered conversations of Siva and Parvati, an
upadeshawhich is love itself.

Saivite cults are open to all, choosing the massive hillocks
and flat plainsto communicate love and
valour. Here are Perumal Murugan’s people, his multi caste village, his green
topography of cultivated land on red soil thathe longs for most. Surely the Goddess at Tiruchengode will usher his
return home.

Thursday, October 13, 2016

We must believe that words have efficacy.
More importantly, we must hope that people believe what they say. War is an
easy word, and drumming for war makes the war mongers feel that they have a job
to do. Soldiers are people who have families, and while soldiering on is
something they do, occupationally, for love of the country, the war mongers see
them as fodder in war. The second world war was fought to end all wars. The
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasake left the molten shadows of men and women on
the kerbside as they ran.

Water wars are the worst, for our common
humanity becomes lost as we view the ‘other’ as the enemy. We always blame
someone else for our troubles. Colonial water sharing devices are out of sync
with modern needs, and egalitarian motives. Across the border, the Pakistani
enjoyment of lands is represented through 200 families owning most of the land.
As in India, when land redistribution occurred, the wealthy families gave away
unproductive lands to the cultivator farmer, and kept the better acreage. So
the ways in which we understand how tribals represent theforce of an illegal marauding army which in
India we call “terrorist”, is placed back in terms of how terrorism manipulates
emotions of border people. The line of no return faces us very soon in terms of
how we think of every day questions of blocking water to Pakistan, which the
present government thinks as practical.

These are mighty rivers, which cross the
borders of China, Pakistan and India. We have seen how floods over run North
East India, when dam work across the border releases excess water. If we block
the Indus, Punjab will be flooded and while boundary lines are political, river
basins are not. The arsenal that Pakistan develops is nuclear. If they bomb us,
they too will die. We do not live in isolation from one another. If the
emotional encroachment in Kashmir over years has been so huge, it is because
the local people have been singled out for attention by terrorist infiltration
and for martyrdom, by specialised training in camps. We have to be very clear
that the presence of the army in border areas is a natural phenomenon. The case
forterritorial supremacy in India is a
question of history. The British could never suppress the emotions ofpeopleof the North West or the North East of India, and over decades, the
Indian government was able to provide a sense of solidarity to tribal
communities in both areas to invest their sense of belonging to the presence of
the Centre. Federalism was seen to be the answer to these multi sited
loyalties. Kashmiri merchants following their trade routesarrived in all parts of India, without
feeling the necessity for secessionism. If we look at the protracted battle
between the Centre and the State, comprising Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh, we must
presume that Kashmir is a part of a larger entity, and should it receive it’s
Azadi, then it will be surrounded by segments of the state which remain loyal
to the subcontinental image of India.

The map of Indiapresents it’s own logic of subcontinental
identity. Terrorism can never promote democracy, as Paul Wilkinson argues in
“Terrorism vs Democracy” ( Routledge 2001). The armoury of guerrilla warfare is
time tested, with successful results, and the price that the civilians have to
pay is huge. Where the state practise of terrorism gets in the way of
diplomacy, we have to understand that the grammar of mediation must come from
other legitimating institutions, such as ambassadorial functions of surrounding
countries. Without State support, the idea of freedom and autonomy, regarding
the right to work and travel may well be taken away from us by parochialising
interests which sees war as the first option available. Why should we think
that people across the borders of our country want to die? They would be the
first victims, and evacuation would create more wounded, more zones of loss and
privation.

Citizens’ forums have a great part to play
in both India and Pakistan. Their role is primary in avoiding war. Unless we
identify our share of common interests, the soldiers whom we value as true
patriots will die terrible deaths in war, or in post war camps. Anyone who has
been to Kargil, knows that the heroism of our soldiers cannot be disputed. Even
now, the stones leach blood. To put the army to dysfunctional use, by shooting
and killing citizens in Kashmir, who think differently from us,is a terrible act of finality. It is true
Gorbachov and Rasisa Gorbachov died in penury and singularly difficult
circumstances, but let us not forget the first lessons of the 1990s, the
lessons in dialogue.